The Second Half

Hurrah! I ate my lunch (Stouffer's Lean Cuisine Butternut Squash Ravioli - oh, so yummy...really...it's my favorite Lean Cuisine, I think. I always feel a little panicky when I don't see it in the store, thinking they might have discontinued it.) and then I tackled the second half of the scarf. The taking-out-the-provisional-cast-on-and-picking-up-stitches went swimmingly. Well, I ended up with one extra stitch but then realized that I had picked up the initial knot of yarn, so that was easily fixed. You then have to do a set-up row and then you launch into the Oak Leaf pattern again, this time headed in the other direction. Well, it looked so wonky that I ripped it out and repeated it, finally deciding to just trust the directions and not look too closely and second guess them with what I thought should be happening. And it worked! The middle looks a little wonky, but then it looks a little wonky in the pattern's illustration, too, so I guess I'm right on track. (The wonkiness is caused by the adjustment needed because the second half is half a stitch off from the first half.)

So now I'm cruising right along again. Well, obviously right now I'm blogging about cruising along...but you know what I mean.

Current Reading

I'm managing to get some reading done in between scarf halves and the excitement of the provision cast on success. I am about two-thirds of the way through Charles Todd's A False Mirror. Todd writes about Ian Rutledge, a Scotland Yard detective who suffered shell shock in WWI. He still hears the voice of Hamish, the soldier he had to execute for failure to follow orders. His boss hates him and wants him to fail. This is the tenth book in the series and, until this one, I've always bought them in hardback (the first five or so from a bookclub, so not full priced). But the last one I read was disappointing enough that I waited for this one to come out in paper. And it's....a little dull. So I think I made the right choice.

In this book, Rutledge is called to a village where an ex-foreign service officer named Hamilton has been viciously attacked and left for dead. Mallory, the man accused of the attack and someone Rutledge knows from the front and hates, has barricaded himself in Hamilton's house, along with Hamilton's wife and maid. And then Hamilton, who has barely shown any signs of consciousness, disappears from the doctor's surgery.

Sounds exciting, right? And it's getting better, but it was sort of slow getting into it. And I am sort of tired of the nasty, mean boss...I can't remember that there is any real reason given for the animosity. Perhaps there was ten books ago and I just can't remember.

Edited later to add: Ooops. A passage in this book lets me know that Rutledge left the care of his doctor and returned to work at the Yard just ten months prior to the start of this tenth book. (Which means there was quite a crime spree in England in those ten months!)